The Last, Lost Empire: 3rd Edition 2012
by Ted Becker
So What Role Does the Internet and Social Media Play in the Democratic Amendment Process?
The early days of the Egyptian Revolution, in Tahrir Square
The photo at the top of this blog shows the early days of the Egyptian Revolution, i.e., “The Arab Spring” in Tahrir Square. Notice the laptop as one of the weapons of choice of the revolutionaries. Another was the cell phone plus its camera. One of those Egyptians who the Western mass media dubbed as a “leader” was an Egyptian Google executive living in Cairo. No surprise there.
A professor of Communications at the University of Washington did a quantitative analysis of the role of social media before and during this massively popular uprising and here is part of what he found: “During the week before Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, for example, the total rate of tweets from Egypt — and around the world — about political change in that country ballooned from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day. Videos featuring protest and political commentary went viral – the top 23 videos received nearly 5.5 million views. The amount of content produced online by opposition groups, in Facebook and political blogs, increased dramatically.” Read more about this here: New study quantifies use of social media in Arab Spring
So does this translate into pro-democracy movements in the West, such as the “Occupy Movement” in the USA and elsewhere? Obviously. Here’s an article from the May 1, 2012 edition of (ironically) Bloomberg News on the use of social media by #Occupy Wall Street in its planning and organization of various protest activities throughout the United States and all the way to Sydney, Australia. Occupy Wall Street Plans Global Protests in Resurgence
In addition to “The Citizens Veto” and “Citizens Initiative to Amend the Constitution,” another democratic right that is enshrined in about 18 state constitutions in America is that citizens can petition to “recall” an elected official. In other words, if a state governor or senator really ticks off a large number of voters–particularly regarding some specific law or set of laws–they can gather a certain number of other voters to remove that person from that position in a Special Election. Arizona and Wisconsin are two of those states—and Recall is alive and kicking in both of them in 2011.
Chapter 3: Recall of State Senator
What Should Happen to a State Senate Majority Leader Responsible for an Unconstitutional Law That Causes Great Harm to a State’s Economy and Reputation? (more…)
Amid all the gloomy news around the world — political, economic, ecological — there is a strong ray of hope. It’s called “democracy,” a natural wonder not often seen to flourish in recent times. There are places, like Switzerland, in which it seems to thrive all the time, but that is in rarified air. Normally, there are patches and bursts of it here and there. But late 2011 saw a quite unexpected explosion of it in one country, with the promise of much more to come in the near future. That country, surprise of surprises, was the Good Old USA…sire and false prophet of “The Elected Oligarchy” as being “democracy.” But that’s at the national level. At the state level, it’s a different story.
So, let me capture this precious moment in the blogosphere, in new series hereinafter dubbed:
Chapter 1:
Citizens Initiative to Amend Constitution (Mississippi)
Does a Single Cell Fertilized Human Egg = A Person ?
As in all of their causes, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, tends towards excess in its moral views as well as its economic ones. Both are in play somewhere all the time. In the moral sphere, the “Right to Life” faction came up with a ploy to abort abortion once and for all at the earliest possible nanosecond. hey have been preparing to foist this upon America all at once, but decided to test it out first in the single state that they were sure to win: Mississippi. (more…)
I have been predicting for decades that the time would come in America when the total failure of its anti-democratic Constitution would result in such widespread pain and suffering among the masses of people, that a new democratic storm surge would wash over that document’s broken promise. I knew that this wave would not leave ruins. I knew it would, instead, nourish a desert littered with the wreckage of wars and the greed of oligarchs. (more…)
The model of consensus building used in this video borrows from general mediation and conciliation theory and practice: A) It aims to hear every point of view; B) It allows people to not buy into a majoritarian sentiment – a thin majority creates almost as many losers as winners; C) It finds ways to include all as stakeholders in the policies.
The hand signals were devised because of limitations arbitrarily imposed by the police in the hope of crippling #OWS, but the #OWS core found ways to cope – much to their credit and via their spirit of democracy and innovation.
This YouTube is a great tool that should inspire many functional mutations, given new circumstances that will arise.
Congressman John Lewis during his impromptu visit to Occupy Atlanta
I don’t know about you, but I get a huge kick out of watching and hearing the cluelessness of politicians, media pundits, self-styled “objective TV correspondents,” bankers, and assorted stuffed suits and dresses scoff at Occupation of Wall Street, or #OWS. Why, they’re “leaderless!” They don’t know what they want! They are all “against” something and are for nothing. Fools. A ragtag bunch. Nostalgia for the sixties. Hippie wannabes. Weirdos. Do nothings! (more…)
Thanks to good friends at the World Direct Democracy Movement, Becker’s 15 Laws of Political Economy are now posted on their website in a number of languages other than English (FYI, these are in Chapter 1 of The Last Lost Empire, whose website you are on and each language is linked at the bottom of this post).
Becker’s 15 Laws explain exactly how the world got in the very precarious plight it is presently in —with the future muddied and muddled at best.
These “laws”, by the way, are not supposed to be legally binding or 100% percent airtight or absolute. They are based on The Normal Curve—statistical and probabilistic. But they usually hold true and this is especially obvious as this point in the evolution of modern human life on this planet. So, to get you started: here they are in English:
Last Saturday, some 4,000 Americans participated in a national conversation about this country’s growing deficit problem. In ten years, according to some estimates, our national debt is projected to grow to 90 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. Participants in Saturday’s “Our Budget, Our Economy” event — which took place in more than 19 cities across the county — deliberated with one another to articulate the values and policies that should guide efforts to reduce the coming burden on our economy and our children.
AmericaSpeaks, the group that organized the event, will present these findings to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
It was distressing that many left intellectuals leveled withering scorn at this event because they viewed it as a vast right-wing conspiracy to manufacture public consent to slash public programs. In the Huffington Post, for example, my one-time co-author Dean Baker wrote that the meeting’s organization — its agenda and materials — “virtually guarantees that most of the participants will opt for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The results of this song-and-dance will the be presented to President Obama’s… commission which will use it as further ammunition… to gut these programs.” Progressive commentator Roger Eskow explained, also in Huffington Post, that “AmericaSpeaks is part of a well-coordinated media campaign” aimed at “slashing government programs” that will benefit “anybody who makes a lot of money and doesn’t want to pay taxes.” (more…)
The Last Lost Empire is a book relevant for the whole world. However, D3, or Direct Deliberative Democracy strategies are likely to differ in different countries. Owing to differences in history and social background, European models will be somewhat different from what works in the USA. (more…)
Planning for Survival by Ismail Rifaat
